Star Wars games have been around since the movies first hit the silver screen, and like most franchises, there have been some real hits as well as some shocking misses. Yet one aspect of Star Wars that has never failed to make a good game is the space combat. X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Rebel Assault, even Jedi Starfighter have all been amazing games in their own right. For some reason though, ground combat has never been tapped quite so well...one needs only to look at the woeful Galactic Battlegrounds RTS for evidence of this. So with a patchy track record and phenomenally high expectations against them, the brave souls at Pandemic studios took up the challenge to bring us a Star Wars army game that doesn't suck. The result? Well, put it this way, the real reason TK-421 wasn't at his post is because he was off playing Star Wars: Battlefront...

The space combat in Star Wars rocks, you'll get no arguments about that, but the traditional skirmishes are just as good, if not more exciting. Jungle warfare on Endor, the entrenched defense of Hoth, and who could forget the tour de force that was the assault on Geonosis? If you are mentally reliving these battles as you read this, then you are exactly who Pandemic had in mind when they crafted Battlefront, which allows you to tackle all these historical battles plus quite a few others. All up there's 10 planets, including Hoth, Endor, Tatooine, Yavin 4, Geonosis and Naboo, with around 15 missions in total. Some of the planets have two very distinct maps; one large, open environment designed for vehicular carnage, and a smaller, often labyrinthine map designed for close quarters infantry fighting. This ensures you'll need to master two very different styles of play to succeed in Battlefront, or you'll find yourself floating home!

Battlefront's single player mode consists of two modes: Galactic Conquest and Historical Campaign. There's an instant action mode too for those moments where you just want to cull the Ewok population of Endor or inflict much pain on Jar-Jar Bink's distant relatives. Historical Campaign is exactly what you would expect from the name, and puts you in control of the most memorable battles of the Star Wars series, during both the Clone Wars and the galactic civil war. Most missions simply involve decimating your opponent's supply of reserves, but occasionally there will be additional objectives, such as destroying the shield bunker on Endor. Sadly, meeting these objectives isn't a requirement; numerical superiority will always result in victory, even if you only win with one or two troops left. The campaigns are also extraordinarily easy to beat, and on normal difficulty you should have no trouble beating both campaigns in four or five hours at the most.

Once you've beaten the Historical Campaigns though, there's always Galactic Conquest mode, which is easily the most enjoyable gameplay mode included. Rather than following a series of loosely grouped battles or just fighting one-off's, Galactic Conquest plays out like a turn-based strategy title, where you actually fight the battles yourself rather than just ordering your troops about. Each faction begins with one or two planets, and these bases are used to stage planetary assaults against other worlds. Each planet on the Galactic Conquest map has two battles that must be won to secure the planet for your cause. Winning a planet doesn't just earn you kudos though, as each world has its own unique special ability that can be brought into play at the beginning of a battle. For example controlling Bespin will allow you to bring in the "Sabotage” planetary bonus, which makes all your opponents vehicles start the game heavily damaged. You can also block your opponent's radar, deploy a Jedi hero, increase your accuracy or gain the ability to regenerate health, all depending on the planets you control. This actually adds a significant level of strategy to the gameplay, and it can be really rewarding to play.

The actual combat in Battlefront is a fairly simplistic affair. Your main goal is to either deplete your opponent's reserves or capture all the Command Posts on the map. How you achieve these goals really doesn't matter much at the end of the day, despite the other objectives you may get. This isn't to say Battlefront can't be played tactically and with teamwork, it's just that the best laid plans can still come undone by a disorganised rabble doing their own thing, but who can shoot well. It's a nice metaphor really, because if scruffy Han Solo, some unarmed droids, a walking carpet and a whiny boy-Jedi can bring the machinations of the Galactic Empire to its knees, so can you!

Each faction has its own unit types, ranging from the bog-standard gunner (think stormtrooper), to snipers, pilots, wookies, heavy weapons and unique units like the Dark Trooper or Republican Jumpjet soldiers. This variety keeps Battlefront going nicely, as you can just run and gun as a grunt if that's your style, or you can take one of the more specialised soldiers and utilise their individual strengths to help the team. It's a nice blend that seems to work quite well, and everyone will have a favourite within a couple of hours playtime. There's also a swag of authentic Star Wars vehicles, ranging from the tiny STAP to the mammoth AT-AT. Each handles differently and have their own functions too, such as the Snowspeeder's magnetic grappling hook, which make taking down an AT-AT seem like child's play...well, if you played Cat's Cradle anyway!

The brevity of the single player modes is Battlefront's biggest problem, but as a solo experience the Artificial Intelligence exhibited by the bots comes in a very close second. Don't even bother playing the game on easy, as your dog would stand a pretty good chance of winning by licking the controller on this "difficulty” setting. Normal isn't a whole lot better either, and you will still encounter some truly woeful A.I. moments here. The problem is that the bots tend to be reactive more than proactive in many cases, so if there isn't something going on in their immediate vicinity, they may just stand there looking as stupid as George W. Bush trying to explain tribal sovereignty. Luckily for you they can actually be ordered to follow you instead of gazing at their armour-plated navels, and it isn't uncommon to have your own squad of bots trailing you around the map.

Still, the A.I. is forgivable given the amount of bots running around, and especially once you see the game in action. Battlefront's graphics are truly fantastic; they aren't superior to other titles, but the way they come together makes for some awesome game moments. Star Wars has never looked so good, and there simply is no other game that makes you feel like you're part of the Star Wars universe as much as Battlefront. If you've been waiting 20 years to play a Stormtrooper, now is your moment! Each planet has been faithfully recreated too, and though they lack the details of Battlefront on PC, the Xbox version looks fantastic, and better yet the framerate is rock solid most of the time. With 32 units running around, each one blazing away with blasters, lobbing grenades or piloting vehicles, achieving a stable framerate is no mean feat, yet Battlefront does it admirably, so if Greedo shoots first, it's because you suck.

Pandemic have really taken a by-the-book approach to Battlefront's audio, and the result is much as you would expect. All the trademark sounds of blaster fire, lightsabre hums, and the whine of Twin Ion Engines are reproduced faithfully, making it instantly familiar to anyone who has seen a movie or played a game set in the Star Wars universe, which by now should probably be the entire world. It's a double-edged vibroblade however; the audio and soundtrack are of an exceptionally high standard befitting the license, but there's nothing fresh about it, and it feels a little generic now, especially to those of us who play every Star Wars release. Anyone lucky enough to have a surround sound setup will get an extra kick out of the audio though, which does a great job of conveying the chaos of combat around you positionally.

Ironically, Star Wars: Battlefront's greatest strength is also its most glaring weakness: multiplayer. It's obvious as soon as you load up your Xbox that Battlefront was built from the ground up with multiplayer in mind, and not just two or four players, but a dozen or more. And much like its spiritual antecedent Battlefield: 1942 on PC, it feels a little bland without a generous helping of real players. This is also where the trouble really starts...

You knew the next sentence would have the word "lag” in it, and you're right. Lag can be a game-killing problem for a multiplayer title, and in a game like Battlefront it's even more important. Experiences will vary, but Xbox World Australia tried the game on your average 512/128kbps connection as well as Cable, and hosting a game with more than 4-6 people on your average ADSL connection will range from patchy to downright unplayable. Cable is an improvement, but ultimately, Battlefront works best if some kind soul with a godlike data transfer rate sets up a dedicated server, which makes things much, much smoother.

Voice communication suffers horribly during lag too, stuttering or even cutting out completely depending on how frantic the action is. If everyone played on MUTE then things would probably run smoother, but teamwork is obviously an integral part of the game, so running silent just isn't an option. The gameplay experience will fluctuate wildly depending on a number of factors: number of human players, number of bots and of course how many people are talking. So for example a quiet game with 4 human players and 4 A.I. bots will result in a stable, albeit tame experience. It really just depends on how much lag you're willing to put up with. Nor is the host immune from such problems; though lag itself is less of a problem, those hosting the game suffer the occasional- but noticeable- hit to their framerate. It's almost inexplicable, but during many of our sessions this was a problem while hosting, even on a cable connection.

So strike one for multiplayer in the Live department at least...But how does the gameplay itself fare? Disappointingly, the answer isn't much better. To begin with, there's no Lobby for multiplayer games, so you can't just chat with friends in between games or plan your strategies. There are no Scoreboards either, so if you single-handedly slaughtered a third of the enemy's reinforcement's one game, you'll never be able to prove it. This is baffling, as Battlefront collects all this info and displays it at the end of each match, along with special awards for the best snipers, killing sprees etc.

As if this wasn't bad enough, Battlefront's worst multiplayer failure is yet to come: customisation, or rather the lack thereof. Your range of options are about as limited as Alderaan's response to the Death Star, only you get much less bang for your buck. You can either play a one-off game, or string a few maps together and play them in a loop, but it's always the same type of game and objectives on each map.

It's almost as if Pandemic have gone to the trouble of showing us what they *could* have done with the game but decided not to. Take the Galactic Conquest mode, with its great strategy elements and the added aspect of an ongoing campaign of, well, galactic conquest. This would've been a unique, dreamlike Xbox Live experience, where clans could vie for universal domination and slug it out planet by planet. Sadly, there's nothing like this online. The sole game mode is the exact same one you play offline, with the exact same objectives that have no impact on the game. You can't limit weapons, or play vehicles only or any of those novelty games that have kept Halo's lifeblood pumping two years after release.

While we can't speak for the rest of the civilised world, with broadband still being fairly limited in Australia, and with 512/128kbps being easily the most common connection speed, it's hard to recommend Battlefront as a Live title for the average user. You may get lucky and find a dedicated host on a fast connection, but more often than not you'll be in for a patchy experience. System Link and Splitscreen options are included of course, and these are far more reliable, but Xbox Live is really what Battlefront was designed for. This isn't to say that it's not worth trying, but if you are considering Battlefront solely for Live, rent it first and make sure these are the droids you're looking for.